The cinema of Bruno Dumont (Flandres, Humanitie, and Hors
Satan) is largely a cinema of denial: no music, no professional actors, no fun.
Not much narrative either: even in a biopic he dispenses with the life story in
an opening scrawl so he can focus himself on the task of filming drab, daily
routine. The sculptor Camille Claudel, a student and former lover of Rodin, was
institutionalized in an asylum by her family after she had lived alone in her
studio for ten years and destroyed much of her work. Dumont’s film restricts
itself to three days in the asylum, as she waits for a visit from her brother,
the poet Paul Claudel.
The film is an abrupt change for Dumont in one aspect: after
preferring non-professional performers in his films, this time he has given the
title role to an actress, and not just any actress but that most devout of
thespians, Juliette Binoche. As her fellow inmates though he has cast patients
from an institution for the mentally challenged. Even if you weren’t familiar
with Dumont’s method any viewer is going to realize that these aren’t actors –
any actor playing a person with a disability will make damn sure that the
viewer knows the amount of work they are putting in.
The film doesn’t give Binoche much to do other than looks
pale and pained against the Avignon scenery and occasionally wail about how
hard done by she is. The first hour is a fairly straightforward study of
artistic martyrdom, but the film does acquire a new level on the hour with the
arrival of her brother Paul, played with film-invigorating fervour by Jean-Luc Vincent,
an academic in only his second film role.
Dumont has declared himself an atheist, but he’s the kind
that likes to flirt with religious themes without ever committing himself.
There is a Calvinist frugality to his cinema: he lays out the stark brutality
of existence in the hope, it seems to me, that viewers will find the wonders
and the miracles in it for him. The film strongly suggest that her brother left
her to rot in this vile institution because it served his own religious
beliefs. Dumont’s film condemns her to artistic martyrdom, without even the
salvation of an afterlife.